Pól Ó Lorcáin
Paul Larkin

Chroniclers are privileged to enter where they
list, to come and go through keyholes, to ride
upon the wind, to overcome in their soarings up
and down, all obstacles of distance, time and
place.
Charles Dickens - Barnaby Rudge,
Chapter The Ninth

Stieg Larsson on the myth of the lone, lunatic fascist gunman

Following the atrocity in Oslo, we have already seen a raft of headlines stating that the racist assassin Anders Behring Breivik was acting alone:
BBC headline: “Norway gun suspect 'acted alone' - ˮ- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-14266815

All this made me go back to a report written by Stieg Larsson for Expo magazine in April 1999. Many Cic Saor readers may be unaware that before his untimely death Stieg (now world famous as the author of the Millennium series of crime novels) was a militant anti fascist and a very effective campaigner against white supremacist propaganda. Stieg helped found Expo magazine in Sweden so as to provide a platform, not only for pro democracy and anti racist views, but also to investigate the far right in Scandinavia. Below, I have translated extracts of Stieg’s very effective dismissal of the idea that right wing assassins are nothing more than lunatics who invariably act on their own. It was written in 1999 but has direct relevance to what is happening in extreme right wing circles today.

Oslo

After the horrendous attack, not just on our comrades in the Labour Youth movement in Oslo, but also on the very notion of democracy itself - the underlying philosophy of fascism being anti democratic - we should only have one response - ¡No pasarán!.

The leadership of the Norwegian Labour Party's youth wing (a much more radical group than our home grown variety) has stated that it will return to the island on which a fascist gunman slaughtered so many of their comrades as soon as possible. This is exactly the correct response to fascist and Nazi ideology.